Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  Maud’s practice was to read each of her books or stories as soon as she received her personal copies. If there were errors, she corrected them in the margins. Her copy of the Countryman has not survived, so we can only conjecture that she felt consternation when she spotted her embarrassing slip, and realized that only one mean-spirited person in Zephyr needed to notice it in order to resuscitate Lily’s gossip over the telephone party-lines.

  In late November 1927, with the serialization well underway, Maud mentions in her journals that she suffers from a fierce attack of her “neurasthenia.” She writes in her journals how “old wounds reopened and bled” (November 30, 1927). In an entry on November 28, 1931, the depth of her lingering anger at Lily resurfaces when she records with thinly disguised glee that Lily is pregnant out of wedlock and has to marry the widower who employed her after she left the Macdonalds. She adds about Lily: “The poor creature can’t speak the truth even when she tries.” Maud’s suppressed rage over Lily had no real outlet except in her journals, and since they were intended for eventual publication, Maud had to be careful what she said there too, lest she give away more than she wanted to, rekindling any of Lily’s stories. In 1926, William Arthur Deacon’s attack on her writing had undercut her celebrity. Now, in 1927, this slip in the serialization could provide tinder for malicious gossips back in Zephyr.

  When the glamorous Captain Smith had sailed into Norval as a dashing war hero, and was so obviously taken with her celebrity and her conversational skills, this was heady attention for the emotionally and intellectually starved woman she had become by then. Maud knew, as no one else did, that The Blue Castle, which had been such a joy to write, bubbled up from the high spirits that Smith’s admiration had engendered. She obscures the fact that Captain Smith provided a model for the heroine’s sexy and mysterious lover, Barney Snaith by all but erasing Smith from her journals. Yet, she left in many small similarities of the heroine, Valancy, to herself, not in the details, but in the fact that poor, plain 29-year-old spinsterish Valancy had been made to feel that everything associated with men and sex was shameful. For its era, The Blue Castle was quite an explicit book in its extremely subtle representation of sexual repression and then sexual satisfaction, helping it get excluded from some church libraries.

  Emily’s Quest (1927)

  In 1926, while she worked on Emily’s Quest, fear of gossip became a running subtext in the entire Emily series.

  In Emily’s Quest, Emily continues to pursue a writing career, but as Maud’s readers were not fully prepared for full-blown career women, there was little choice but to end the trilogy with her marriage. Emily chooses— from three possible suitors—the young man who has become a world-famous artist, Teddy Kent. He is internationally regarded as a “genius,” and every portrait he paints of a woman has something of Emily in it. This reflects another prevalent attitude: that women should live through their men. Emily’s immortality will come through Teddy’s achievements—a compromise, of sorts. (Frederick Philip Grove left an unpublished novel at his death that is built on the same theme.)

  Readers pelted Maud with letters as she finished the novel; they weighed in on which suitor Emily should choose. Readers’ responses also reflected the changing times. Many readers felt uneasy over the possessive Dean Priest and worried that he might re-enter the picture. Teddy Kent was hardly a perfect choice either; some readers picked up on his self-absorption, noting that he is devoted to his own career and his art. Emily’s artistic abilities do not interest Teddy any more than they did Dean Priest, whose disparaging words were responsible for her destruction of her first novel manuscript. However, Maud had limited choices, and she married Emily off to Teddy Kent.

  The intelligent and ambitious hired boy, Perry, is out of the question for Emily because of his low social status and his rough edges: he marries Emily’s friend, Ilse. And, in fact, much of the book’s focus is on Ilse, a high-spirited young woman who gets herself “talked about.” (Her mother, accused of having a lover, has been the subject of truly lurid gossip, but in the first Emily novel, Emily has a “dream vision” that ultimately proves this to be false.)

  Maud freely admitted that Emily was based on herself. But she did not acknowledge that the wild and rebellious Ilse came out of another part of her personality. Ilse is a free spirit, the embodiment of the energy and lawlessness that Maud might have exhibited if Grandmother Macneill had not reined her in so tightly. And Ilse’s father is much like Maud’s—useless as a protector or guide. Maud was relieved when she finished the book in December 1926. It had been a chore.

  In late 1926, Maud had many other things on her mind. The Scottish maid, Margaret MacKenzie, had turned out to be untrainable. Maids lived with the Macdonald family, ate with them, and were included in family outings (with their way paid), so it was important for them to be companionable. Fed up with Margaret’s surly behaviour, Maud fired her.

  In January 1927, Maud hired Mrs. Mason, a widow with a young daughter named Helen. Mrs. Mason, like Maud, was a very private person. We do not know if she told Maud her story, but if she had, Maud would have felt sympathetic: it bore similarities to that of the heroine in The Blue Castle. Mrs. Mason (born Margaret Ruth Checkley), the favourite daughter of a very strict and authoritarian father with a large and successful farm near Arthur, Ontario, had run away with a farmhand from the neighbouring property, William Mason. Handsome and well dressed, he had come from England and taken a job as a menial worker in rural Ontario. He was middle-aged, received little or no mail, and told nothing of his past. People wondered if his name was really his own. Mrs. Mason fled her father’s wrath, either before or after she married (if she was indeed married), and the couple left for the United States. In fairly short order, Helen was born (June 21, 1925), and William Mason reportedly died of cancer—or so Mrs. Mason told Helen when she grew up. Either unwilling or unable to return home, Mrs. Mason brought her baby back to Toronto, taking refuge with a sister while she sought some means of support. With no one to look after her daughter, factory work in Toronto would have been very difficult. For Maud, life eased again with a good maid in the house.

  January 1927 proved an eventful month in other ways. The new year began with a letter from Marshall Pickering’s lawyer, Mr. Greig, threatening to take Ewan’s unpaid debt to the officials in the Presbyterian Church in Toronto. Given that the Norval church was $300 behind in paying Ewan’s 1927 salary of $1,800. Greig could garnishee Ewan’s salary if he found this out.

  The Macdonalds were puzzled over why the salary was in arrears. In early January 1927 the mystery was solved when a nervous John Russell came to them, in secret. John, the church treasurer, had been “borrowing” from the church funds. He told the Macdonalds that he had expected a windfall of $500 for injuries suffered in a job some time earlier, and had been borrowing against that for some time. The year-end annual meeting of Session managers was approaching, and he did not have the funds to replace what he had taken. If the fact that money was missing was discovered, the congregation would be in an uproar; even worse, those in the United Church would enjoy a laugh over the Presbyterians losing God’s money to a thief in their midst.

  Rather than approach his own family, John Russell came to the Macdonalds and asked for a loan of the missing amount. That would pay Ewan’s salary and replace the balance before Russell was found out at the annual meeting. He promised to give Maud a promissory note to repay her when he could—in other words, probably never.

  Maud was no stranger to the ironies of life. She had no choice but to lend the money, noting gallantly that whatever John’s motivations were, he had stood by the Macdonalds in the Pickering affair. John apparently felt no guilt over his “borrowing” church money, for he had firmly intended to repay it, just as he firmly intended to repay Maud. She grimly remarked that at least the situation would seal his loyalty to them. She had made $4,300 from royalties and investments in 1926, and would make $10,794 in 1927. She could afford to pay part of her husband’s
salary in this roundabout way. Such a turn of events could hardly have pleased poor Ewan, but what could he do? If Maud did not help cover up the thievery, it would create a huge disruption in the church and scandal in the community.

  In the meantime, Maud’s gift for “making things go” was energizing an entire community again. She organized a new fundraising adventure, the Olde Tyme Concert, a social event in which people dressed and performed as historical figures. Maud herself, appropriately costumed, recited “The Widow Piper.” In a time before television, these theatrical ventures not only provided entertainment, but also gave local people with talent a creative outlet. And they raised money for church maintenance and charitable projects. Sometimes the Olde Tymers took their performances to other churches.

  In mid-January 1927, Maud went to nearby Guelph, and spoke to a capacity audience at a Women’s Club. The Guelph Mercury reported on her speech:

  [She made a] fervent plea for the support of Canadian authors as the means of establishing a Canadian national literature. “Canadian authors, having competition from both England the United States, were,” she said, “at a disadvantage, and were frequently compelled to go elsewhere, in order to provide themselves with bread and butter and soap. If the departure of these young authors continues, there will never be a Canadian literature.” … “Literature is not a sporadic gift from a capricious God. It is a slow growth, and cannot spring from a sordid, petty, and materialistic people. To establish a national literature, our ideas must be noble and enduring, our culture real and profound, because genius is the ability to grasp and give expression to all that has ever existed in the inarticulate soul of a people.”

  One might suspect that such high-minded sentiments would have bored the audience, but the report continued:

  Mrs. McDonald [sic], who has an international reputation for her books, proved to be one of the most entertaining speakers ever heard locally. Her address was characterized by a brilliant wit, and a charming undercurrent of sly humour, which made listening to her an unalloyed pleasure.20

  She finished off her address by reciting some of her own poems and reading some amusing letters from her male readers, particularly what she called “freak” ones: one man wrote about how much he enjoyed her writing, adding judiciously that he was married and only writing out of “pure friendship”; and a Kansas city lawyer wrote her that he had had a dream in which he’d met “Paddy” (a cat in one of her books) in Heaven. And a serious young divinity student in North Carolina enjoyed her books but complained that he feared that her practice of “marrying off all her characters” would bring contempt to the holy state of matrimony. She told the group that she had written this divinity student that if he preferred, she would have her characters live together without benefit of the marriage vows. Then she finished with a reading from The Golden Road.

  This basic speech format she used over and over in small towns, and invariably the newspapers reported on what a good speaker she was. She kept people laughing—she was a witty storyteller, with perfect timing. She made a point of reading letters from male fans to offset the growing perception that her books were enjoyed only by women and children.

  By early February, Maud was catching up on her letter-writing. She got letters off to her old pen-pals G. B. MacMillan and Ephraim Weber. She answered every fan letter, handwriting each in a standardized format: she was glad they liked her writing so much that they’d taken the trouble to write and tell her; getting letters from her readers all over the world was one of her greatest pleasures; and she regretted that she was so busy she could only pen a line or two in reply. Then she answered questions they asked and told them about her newest book.

  Occasionally someone’s letter appealed to her, and she gave that person permission to write her once a year. To one such correspondent, a young man named Jack Lewis, she wrote in February 1927: “I am very glad my books have helped you to appreciate our world. But I guess the power of appreciation was there, though perhaps not awakened, or my books could not have put it into you.” She added that she loved Prince Edward Island “more than any other place on earth. Someday I am going to write a book about legends and sea-stories of the old North Shore. And that will be a book boys will like!”

  To another young fan named Evelyn Johnston, she wrote that Emily’s story wasn’t hers, but the flash was. Then she copied out a long description of an imaginary place called “The Land of Uprightness,” which she had written earlier, in which she made note of climbing the “hills of firs” and looking “down over the fields of mist and silver in the moonlight.”

  In this airy passage (the kind of fancy-writing that Modernist critics deplored, but which might have intrigued later Freudian critics), she merges the landscape of Cavendish, the Island (where there is a harbour), and the landscape of Norval, where, from Russells’ Hill, she could look down over the mists rising in moonlight above the forks of the Credit River. When the light was right, Norval was indeed a fairyland: there were times when this landscape produced in Maud the magical release of feeling that sent her imagination soaring, what Emily called “the flash.”

  Maud repeatedly puzzled over how the pine trees on Russells’ Hill could transport her, and she reflected in her journal:

  My love for pines has always been a very deep and vital and strange thing in my life. I say strange because there is nothing in my life— or this life—to account for it. There were no pines in my early home. Very few pines in P. E. Island at all. One or two each in the woods. Yet I always loved pines better than any other tree. And I wrote scores of poems about them; and now that I have come to live in a place that is rich in pines I find that those old poems were true and expressed the charm and loveliness of pine trees as well as if I had known pines all my existence … (December 23, 1928)

  Balsam firs she had had in abundance in PEI, but not pines. She may have forgotten that, as a little girl of about ten or eleven, she had studied a prose piece called “The Pine” by the English Victorian art critic John Ruskin, which appeared in the Third Book of Reading Lessons in the Royal Reader Special Canadian Series:

  The pine—magnificent! Nay, sometimes almost terrible. Other trees, tufting crag or hill, yield to the form and sway of the ground.… But the pine rises in serene resistance, self-contained; nor can I ever without awe stay long under a great Alpine cliff … looking up to its companies of pines, as they stand on the inaccessible juts and perilous ledges of the enormous wall, in quiet multitudes, each like the shadow of the one beside it—upright, fixed spectral, as troups of ghosts standing on the walls of Hades …

  Ruskin goes on to describe the strength, shape, and power of the pines in this ornate rhetorical style, focusing on how Nature (and pines) can inspire the viewer.

  When Maud read Ruskin in school, he gave her a “grand” way of seeing and responding to Nature. She, in turn, writing in her own style, taught millions of her young readers like Jack Lewis to see and appreciate and respond to the world of nature around them. Her word-painting provided filler, mood, and atmosphere in her novels, but it also gave aesthetic pleasure to many, taking them beyond the more prosaic realities of life. Other people in Norval looked up at Russells’ Hill and saw a few ragged pine trees. Maud saw the hill with its pines as a portal to another world—one of beauty, of enchantment, of inspiration. In practical terms, her way of describing nature brought a never-ending stream of tourists to Prince Edward Island. She would need this romantic and imaginary escape increasingly as the “wheel of things” began to spin faster and faster.

  The real world always reasserted itself, bringing Maud back down from her rhetorical highs. In February 1927, eleven-year-old Stuart disappeared after going out ice-skating on the Credit River with a friend. Carried away with the glories of the “wingèd heel,” the boys had found themselves far from home when darkness fell and sensibly decided to walk home on roads, unaware that they were the object of a huge search. (A child could easily fall through the ice where the water was shallow and fa
st-running, especially after dark when the hazards were hard to spot.) Maud’s fright took a toll on her fragile nerves.

  In addition, the L. C. Page and Company lawsuit dragged on. In early February 1927, the Master’s report had awarded her $16,000 of Page’s profits from Further Chronicles, but she knew that actually getting the money out of the publisher would be a long, expensive process.

  Then, on the Island, the Campbells continued to need Maud’s help. Ella’s daughter Amy borrowed money to study nursing (she would become one of the few people who paid Maud back). Over the years, the hapless Stella Campbell had borrowed thousands for her wild schemes and repaid nothing. In Ontario, Maud had lent money to a Leaskdale widower, Will Cook (later Lily’s husband), who failed to repay her. And a friend from Leaskdale times, Mary Gould Beal, had borrowed money in 1925, and again in 1926, as her husband’s business suffered a downward spiral. Money issues were beginning to trouble Maud: Chester was attending an expensive private school, and she planned for Stuart to go there as well.

  But there were happy moments, too. In April, Chester stood third in his class at St. Andrew’s, and he declared that he wanted to study mining-engineering for a profession (April 19, 1927). Stuart, still in Norval, was a constant delight to her. The Young People’s Guild play Maud had directed was a smash hit, bringing in $78 for the church. A New York theatre company took out an option on The Blue Castle. Anne of Green Gables was translated into French. Her royalties seemed better. And Norval’s natural beauty continued to be enchanting. With spring and summer coming, her spirits were rising. She wrote in her journals: